Cuomo's (very) low-turnout primary win

ALBANY—Last night’s Democratic primary race is shaping up as one of the lowest-turnout statewide contests in recent memory.

Unofficial election results from the state’s Board of Elections show only about 9.3 percent of the state’s 5.8 million registered Democrats cast their ballots in the primary contest last night, the lowest turnout in a Democratic statewide primary in more than a decade.

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Turnout actually dipped below 2002’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, when Cuomo took himself out of the race against then-state comptroller Carl McCall shortly before the vote to avoid an expected hiding, and remained on the ballot in name only.

According to unofficial returns, 531,205 Democrats voted yesterday, which was also lower than the 661,296 who voted in 2010, when there was no competitive race for governor.

While voter turnout is often low in a primary race in New York State, especially when the contest isn’t expected to be close, as was the case with Cuomo’s race against Zephyr Teachout, political scientists said the numbers from Tuesday night were particularly abysmal.

In 2006, when Eliot Spitzer trounced Tom Suozzi, 762,947 Democrats voted. (Spitzer got about 82 percent of the vote, or about 20 points better than Cuomo.)

While results are not yet final, the state’s board of elections showed Cuomo won the race with approximately 62 percent of the vote, or roughly 329,441 votes. Teachout managed to win 181,859 votes, or approximately 34 percent.

“For an incumbent governor to be held under two thirds of a vote in his own party is not a sign of strength, even if nobody turned out to vote, and the fact that nobody turned out to vote makes it clear that his candidacy was uninspiring,” said Ken Sherrill, a political science professor at Hunter College.

Cuomo himself did little to motivate turnout, ignoring Teachout, who had meager resources for her own get-out-the-vote efforts and mostly relied on volunteers.

Cuomo's campaign has blamed the low turnout for his relatively poor showing relative to his little-known opponent, arguing that the "most passionate groups"—namely anti-fracking protesters and disgruntled public employees—had an outsize impact. (Cuomo had argued before the results came in that his supporters were passionate, too.)

In the end, his margins were particularly high in Erie County, where his running mate Kathy Hochul has her home base, and in the outer boroughs of New York City, where he had backing from the county organizations.

Unofficial returns show about 51.9 percent of the ballots cast came from the New York City, area. The largest percentage of those votes were cast in Brooklyn’s Kings County, which took in 95,140 votes, about 17.3 percent of all the votes cast in the primary. Cuomo earned 61,910 of them there.

The governor won every borough, but he won Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx by huge margins. Although he won in Manhattan, he did not do so by a particularly wide margin, taking 52.61 percent of the vote to Teachout’s 41 percent.

“The only word I can use is 'lassitude' to explain what went on in this campaign,” Sherrill said. “All joking aside, his approach to campaigning is mystifying. I can tell you—since 30 years ago I was involved in a campaign that [Cuomo] managed, the Mondale campaign in '84—I know that as a campaign manager he wouldn’t have tolerated this kind of lassitude."

“Unless he’s had a personality transplant you’d think that he would want to crush his opponent,” Sherrill added. “This is somebody who has a reputation for not liking it when people crush him.”

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., a co-chair of the Cuomo campaign, dismissed the idea that Teachout's performance showed some weakness for the governor.

“When you are executive of the state of New York, you can’t make everyone happy,” Diaz said in an interview. “Last I checked, when you win an election with better than 60 percent, that’s a pretty clear whuppin'. I’ll take 60 percent plus on any election, any day. In my political analysis there was a whuppin’ last night and there’ll be another one in November."